First Off: Really great work, the game is coming along fantastically! Love it! There is something I think is worth talking about again, (even though it has been mentioned before) which is the planetary lighting. There needs to be a lot more contrast from the light to dark sides of the planet. (the dark side is still far too light, it doesn't even look like its on the night side of the planet, it just looks like there is no lighting / bad lighting) I would suggest drastically lowering the ambient light of the planet, and then give all the units some type of small light. (so they are easily visible on the dark side) Also, if the planets were to slowly rotate, this would add a lot to the the game, and even it out for every player, so not one player is stuck with the dark side. This would also add some interesting gameplay: Darkness could slightly decrease your likely hood of being spotted... OR it could do the exact opposite, if the units had lights. So you would possibly want to choose 'when' you perform an assault. Additionally, for a cool graphical feature, you could give every building flood lights that turn on when a base is on the 'night side', to light up the surroundings. (very atmospheric)
This kind of things really comes down to gameplay, I do think it can go a bit darker, how much we'll have to wait and see I guess. The Ultimate thing would be if there was a slider in the options, so you can find the perfect setting(akin to gamma settings really) that suits you monitor and the ambient lighting where ever you computer is located. Mike
A sun intensity / ambient light slider, would definitely work for me. More contrast would really add to the atmosphere of the game.
No, you actually don't want the contrast to be too huge, othewise it affects visibility and tends to be harsh on the eyes. I'd recommend following the idea of lower contrast for backgrounds, higher contrast for units. (Although maybe less of a contrast on unit shadowing, because that can hurt readability.) In any case, I'm sure that will all be worked out. The key is to keep everything readable and easy to look at first, and pretty to look at second.
I completely disagree. The units have icons, and other hud graphics to make them easily viewable on screen. Uber is free to do whatever they want to make the game look appealing and/or more realistic. Nothing makes a game uglier quicker, than washing out the lighting. Look at WoW, as a perfect example. They raised the ambient light during the nights a while back so people that only played late at night weren't always in the dark. (sounds fair enough) BUT, the community began screaming at them to fix it. (which they have now agreed to do in an upcoming patch) The lesson here is that people want atmosphere, even if it slightly alters gameplay. That being said, the gameplay issues that may arise from going to a realistic day/night on each planet can be easily offset with lights and strategic icons on every unit.
This. When I play I take that slider until the darkness looks like a lit room. It's just easier and more enjoyable for me to play. I have trouble with readability and operation if I have visual ambiguity and/or too much grays. Surprisingly I didn't have trouble with mech commander 2. I think this is partly because I was so familiar with the units before seeing them in night fight and the game is such a smaller scale of content to keep track of. In case you are interested, night fight starts in this youtube video at 5:10 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K5Y7eb-uRKk
Just ignore anything visual until at least the beta, there is no reason to waste time on tweaking visuals like lighting until most of the final art is pretty much done because the values that work for art now might not work for the final art. The current lighting is likely just placeholder to ensure the tech is working correctly and can achieve everything they hope to use it for. Lighting is something that is relatively easy to change but it can take a fair chunk of time tweaking values to really get it to look nice and at this stage of development that time is much better spent on other things anyway.
